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Dallas Buyers Club LLC Abandons Fight Against Australian Pirates (theage.com.au)
New submitter aphelion_rock writes: It's a happy day for Aussie pirates: The Hollywood studio behind the film Dallas Buyers Club has abandoned its fight to extract huge sums of cash from alleged copyright infringers. Dallas Buyers Club LLC had until midday Thursday to lodge a second appeal against an August Federal Court decision which effectively prevented it from engaging in so-called 'speculative invoicing' in Australia.
I don't know if this is a coincidence, but Dallas Buyers Club went live on SBS On Demand service on Thursday. So if you're Australian, you can watch it for free, legally, right now.
Haven't seen it myself. No idea if the movie is any good. But there you go.
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Or as Americans might say, the letter of the law, not the spirit of the law.
Justice Nye Perram was forced to agree with DBC LLC over the matter of copyright infringement, so they won on that case. However the Justice was also aware of what happened in the US when the studio's lawyers were permitted to go on a fishing expedition through the ISP's customer records then send them what amounted to extortion notices threatening an expensive law suit if they didn't immediately pay a sum of money. So called "speculative invoicing".
To prevent this, the justice made DBC LLC pay a bond of about A$600,000 which would be forfeited if they tried speculative invoicing. The agreement meant any communications with the ISP's customers had to be vetted by the courts. After having repeated attempts rejected because they asked for far too much info and were pretty much a prelude to speculative invoicing it became clear to DBC LLC that they would never make a profit on this and simply cut their losses.
I think I'm pretty safe in saying that the reason DBC LLC has withdrawn their case is just to get their bond back. Dallas Buyers Club was technically in the right, but did everything in the wrong way. That being said, I doubt the Justice was ever going to let them profit on it, setting a precident that you shouldn't go after end users in Australia, even if you are technically right.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Just a correction. They never lodged the $600k bond in the first place. They tried to negotiate multiple different letters and approaches with Justice Perram first. They also wanted to claim damages based on whether the person had shared / downloaded works by people unrelated to DBC and they wanted to claim damages based on the downloader having obtained an international distribution license.
In the end Justice Perram cracked the shits and said ffs stop with the pissing around and either comply with my requirements or fuck off. You have until COB Feb 12th to come up with something not stupid in your letter.